Kenya should not allow war to swim in the sea of Turkana oil

In So Many Hungers, Indian writer Bhabani Bhattacharya writes that ‘war swims in the sea of oil’. From Kuwait, whose oil-rich underbelly triggered the Gulf War of the early 1990s, to Libya, oil has fuelled the interest of global capitalists, and sparked fear that if not controlled, undemocratic states could buy arms illegally, fund terrorist groups and threaten world peace.

Indeed, quite a few of these rogue states, drunk on oil funds, have been financing terrorist groups such as al Qaeda. I remember a delegation from Kenya paid a visit to former Libya leader Muammar Gaddafi at the height of his campaigns for an imaginary United States of Africa. And I shudder to imagine what projects these Kenyans would have initiated had Gaddafi doled out millions of dollars to them. Of course, some of these fears are unfounded, like in the case of Washington’s pre-war claim of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The whole world was shocked! The tomahawks and tanks roared into Iraq, before the weapons of mass destruction turned out to be weapons of mass deception!